NTT DoCoMo and Twitter Team Up to Offer New Services

Popular social networking company Twitter and major carrier NTT DoCoMo have recently signed an agreement that will bring carrier's customers new services based on Twitter app.

According to both companies, under the agreement the carrier will develop innovative applications and services incorporating Twitter features.

The new apps and services will be available on NTT DoCoMo feature-phones and smartphones, but it is unclear if they will be offered for free or for a certain monthly fee.

However, one of the already planned services that will be developed by both companies will bring richer search results to carrier's customers.

It appears that real-time tweets and other Twitter content will be added to the search results on the DOCOMO “i-mode” portal for feature-phones and the “docomo market” portal for smartphones.

According to NTT DoCoMo, the service is expected to be launched for feature-phones this summer and for smartphones later this year or early next year.

In addition, the carrier plans to update an existing “touch and follow” application for feature- phones, as well.

The “touch and follow” feature will allow two NTT DoCoMo customers to begin following each other quickly and easily by simply placing their feature-phones together to exchange follow permissions via the NFC data transmission function of the carrier's phones.

The companies are also in talks for the development of a location-based alerting service for smartphone users based on tweets.

Apparently, Twitter will be provide its database to the carrier, but will remove data that could identify the users, before using the tweets that are stored. 

A release date for this service has yet to be disclosed, and it seems that the carrier decided to make it available for smartphone users initially.

As a side note, according to NetRatings Japan, there were around 17.57 million Twitter users in Japan as of March.